I was sitting in Paris on the last day of a 3-day partner enablement event when Informatica’s IT Director Eric Johnson said some words I hadn’t really thought of, but jarred me. He was asked to talk about the world of the IT buyer, what his pains are, how people should approach him and what real partnerships mean. Within the first three minutes he said something to the effect of “don’t tell me your products help IT and business better align or that our problem is that we aren’t aligned.” He pointed out that it almost comes across as an insult to insinuate that the IT group isn’t interested in the business, when in fact IT is run like a business itself with extra scrutiny since it’s often one of the largest spends for a company. So, years of justifying spend makes alignment a requirement, not a nice to have.
This got me thinking – what is the issue between business and IT? Maybe it’s not about opinions or personalities, but about the barriers to alignment. Alignment is like my wife and I agreeing that we both need to lose some weight. How we lose that weight and by what pace (the imperative) is a different story. So, it’s possible to be aligned but almost never be at the same place at the same time. In many cases the ability to be “synchronized” is more of the challenge. IT has a complicated world of interdependencies that make shifting direction and accelerating very challenging. At the same time, the demands of business force constant consideration and change.
Perhaps our language and focus needs to be more on how we synchronize. How technologies and cultures keep IT and business in step. The top reason why on-demand cloud application adoption has grown without the knowledge of IT (apps that business people sign-up for) is because of the perceived lack of synchronization (speed and ease to match the business need). IE – a business person probably thinks “If I ask IT for that, it will take too long and it’s so much easier to do with my credit card.” A couple years and dozens of business people later will result in legacy 7.0, where IT has to figure out how to deal with so many redundant apps and services in the cloud, on the ground and in the vaporshere (yes, I made “vaporshere” up).
When sales and marketers pitch technology products to both IT and business, how are they helping them synchronize?
[...] Some would argue that the IT group has trouble getting things done. Some might argue that IT isn’t aligned with the business and describes methods and processes to help IT align better while others argue that it isn’t alignment that is the problem…its the ability for the IT group to be agile and synchronized with the organization. [...]